Fourth of July Manicure Experiment / First Post!

Hello nail polish bloggers of the world!
I have just spent the past few weeks discovering the vast universe of nail polish addicts out there, sharing their beautiful, touching stories. ;) After a descent into the void of Sally Hansen Turquoise Opal nail polish swatches (that is the BEST polish IMO, hence my blog-name), I started to feel like this part of my life and personality needs more of a voice! I want to be more inspired and more creative! And I hope joining this amazing nail polish community online will continue to help with that, as it has over the past few weeks.
I would like to think that I have a unique style and passion for manicures that goes beyond the average nail polish enthusiast. I've been hoarding and painting with polish since I was a little kid. I'm now a muralist, and 26 years old, but my first painting ever (a valentine for my 8th grade boyfriend) started with a sheet of construction paper and about 25 bottles of nail polish.
I actually still have most of those bottles, and thanks to sally's beauty secrets nail polish thinner, they all still work!
Anyway, it's super late and tomorrow's the fourth of july! So I should hit the hay soon... I am just dying to show off my USA inspired manicure that I did tonight.
I used a technique that I learned from More Nail Polish but I adapted it a little bit.

I did a kind of random water marble in reds, whites, golds, and blues. (I used Clarins - 38188, essie - meet me at sunset, deborah lippmann - footloose, sally hansen - candy apples creme, essie - beach bum, illamasqua - phallic, revlon - gold coin, jane - megawatt, zoya - elizabeth arden ?, and opi - alpine snow.) Then i took a piece of plastic bag to pick up the designs, cut out shapes, and started applying the shapes to my almost-dry base of OPI alpine snow.

It didn't go very smoothly at first, so to salvage the situation I decided to embrace the chaos and am super excited about the results! I just kept taking small bits of the marbles and collaging them over each other until I thought it looked cool enough to stop. I then lamely attempted to cover up my ugly areas with Deborah Lippmann's Boom Boom Pow, applied sporadically. Then the final Seche Vite layer.

here they are in sunlight, a little more red than the pics last night.

The pinky is two coats of DL - boom boom pow over one coat of jane - megawatt, a 90's glitterbomb.

And I couldn't let my first post go by without showing off my Sally Hansen's Nail Prisms - Turquoise opal.
It is the most magical polish I've ever seen. Today is not only a day when I celebrate the birth of my dear nation, but the day I buy two bottles of passable T.O. dupe - Ozotic 505 at shop.llarowe.com! I use my precious original (first love) bottle of turquoise opal very sparingly, and decided it would last longer as a toenail polish. So here are some toe swatches, with a couple of dupe-esque polishes that I was comping.

These are all legit, with the exception of the pinky toe. I used Wet n Wild - grey's anatomy as a base, because I think that using a black base coat destroys a lot of the gorgeous depth of the color, and I am too cheap to do four coats of SH. I think it was 2 coats wet n wild, 2 coats sally hansen, and the pinky toe has one coat of Hits Mari Moon - Artsy on top. (Not a passable comp. Too indigo.) It looks like Mari Moon's cutie pie might be a closer match.

On this foot I have 2 legit T.O. nails on the left. The middle toe and big toe are a similar, but much less vibrant, Chameleon - Nucleus. The second toe in (index toe?) has a coat of Mari Moon - Artsy on it. All topped off with Seche Vite. I can thank the nail polish blogs for filling me in on that totally amazing topcoat!

That's not all! But it's all for tonight.
Happy fourth of July!!!

Saroca